FrankLad's Forum Topics

Hey guys!
I’m planning to build a relatively small workshop and am very interested in running it on solar power. At the moment I operate out of a spare upstairs room in our home.
I mainly handcraft wooden rings and build ring boxes, etc., so I’m not a heavy power-tool user. I run a small benchtop dust collector (Grizzly G9955...

Hey, fellow LJs!
We had a customer send some wood to be used in a set of rings for himself and his wife. The wood comes from New York. The customer isn’t sure what kind of wood it is.
From what I can tell, this must have been a fallen limb. It has some spalting going on and the wood is just prior to becoming “punky”. ...

Hey guys!
Well, with more and more requests for wooden rings made from customer-supplied wood, I decided to purchase a bandsaw. Up until now, I’ve been getting by with splitting thin stock in some species (hickory, oaks… really easy) or carefully cutting by hand with a pullsaw and sanding down to the appropriate thickness for ben...

Have any of you guys ever used floating tenon joinery on pieces that might see lots of racking/use/wear-n-tear… like on chairs or other types of furniture?
Not long ago I did some basic tests wherby I cut and sanded two pieces (some 3” round pine pieces that had been air-drying for a few months) each at an angle so that they would...

Wanted to share this for anyone else who works with thin material…
Today I tried cutting some veneer with standard rotary cutters (the kind you can pick up at Wal-Mart or fabric stores… Fiskars brand in this case… around $17.)
Prior to this, I’ve been using a hobby/x-acto knife with a metal straight-edge/ruler (with...

I’ve been quite busy with the wearable wooden rings lately. Most of the time I work on them in my house – in a spare upstairs room (no workshop yet).
The issue is… I do a lot of hand-sanding on these guys. Granted, these are small items so we’re not talking about a pile of dust, but it’s enough that I go over t...

My dad often tells me “Everything’s a tradeoff.”
Selecting a finish for wearable wooden rings is one of those cases. I currently have two choices:
#1: I can use a fairly durable membrane finish (have used Waterlox and currently General Finishes Arm-R-Seal) to achieve the shimmering grain and glossy look that so many cus...

Hey guys!
I currently use Gorilla Glue for my wearable wooden rings, particularly the ones that are built up from several layers of wood and cut out.
However, for the bentwood rings I am looking into cyanoacrylate / “super” glues. Today I tried the Gorilla brand super glue, and found it so much more convenient for gluing up th...